Orphan
Kate (Vera Farmiga) and John Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard) are experiencing strains in their marriage after Kate's third child was stillborn. The loss is particularly hard on Kate, who is still recovering from a drinking habit that cost her her job. While visiting the local orphanage, they decide to adopt Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), a nine-year-old Russian girl. While Kate and John's daughter Max (Aryana Engineer), who is deaf and communicates with sign language, embraces Esther almost immediately, their son Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) is somewhat less welcoming.
Kate grows suspicious when Esther, who watched Kate and John have sex, expresses far more knowledge of sex and its slang than would be expected for a child her age. Not long after Esther arrives, she pushes a schoolmate who had picked on her off a playground slide, breaking her ankle. Max saw Esther shove the girl, but covers for Esther by saying that the girl slipped. At dinner Daniel is mad and annoyed at Esther even saying "she's not my fucking sister."
Kate is further alarmed when Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder), the head of the orphanage, warns her and John about Esther's tendency to be around when things go wrong. Esther overhears this and later kills Sister Abigail by bludgeoning her with a hammer. She forces Max to help her hide the body and the hammer. Daniel sees Esther and Max descending from his treehouse from behind a rock, not knowing they hid the hammer there. Later that night, Esther threatens to emasculate Daniel if he tells anyone what he saw.
Kate is told that the Russian orphanage Esther came from has no record of her ever being there. However, John does not believe her, despite continued ominous behavior by Esther. At one point, Esther breaks her own arm in John's vise and convinces John that Kate broke it after Esther desecrated the garden grave site of her stillborn child's ashes. When John suggests that Kate spend the night downstairs while Esther stays in the master bedroom, Kate drives out and purchases two bottles of wine. After a struggle, she pours the opened bottle of wine down the drain. On Esther's first day back at school, she slips Kate's SUV into neutral, nearly killing Max. Afterward, John and Kate's psychiatrist confront her with the unopened bottle which Esther had found. They blame the accident on her carelessness because of her hangover.
Kate learns that Esther was housed at a mental institution in Estonia called the Saarne Institute, but when she expresses misgivings to John, he and her counselor thinks that Kate is relapsing into her drinking habit. After John produces the other bottle Kate bought the night before, he threatens to leave her unless she gets help.
Daniel learns of the hammer from Max and decides to get it and go to the police. However, Esther sets the treehouse on fire, intending to get rid of the evidence and kill Daniel. Daniel escapes by falling out of the tree, severely injuring his neck and knocking him unconscious. Esther tries to finish him off by smashing a brick over his head, but Max shoves her out of the way just in time. Esther again tries to kill him at the hospital by unhooking his respirator and attempting to smother him with a pillow, placing him in a near-fatal coma. Doctors rush into the room and manage to save Daniel. Outside, Kate angrily knocks Esther down, calling her a "bitch", and is subdued and sedated by doctors.
That night, Esther tries to seduce a drunk and dazed John, who had drank Kate's last bottle. John realizes Kate was telling the truth all along and threatens to call the orphanage for some arrangements for Esther's stay with the Coleman family, but is stabbed to death by Esther after John discovered her disturbing artwork in her dark, now-ransacked room.
As the now-widowed Kate is coming out of sedation, she gets a call from the Saarne Institute's director, Dr. Värava (Karel Roden), who reveals a terrifying secret that Esther isn't a nine-year-old girl at all, but a thirty-three-year-old woman named Leena Klammer. She has hypopituitarism, a disorder that stunted her physical growth and has spent most of her life as a serial killer posing as a little girl (it is revealed to the audience when Esther/Leena sheds her child's clothes, that she has scars on her neck and wrists, from self-inflicted injuries which had led doctors to keep her in a straitjacket, and also has fully developed breasts).
When Kate got home, she was finally pushed over the edge after discovering her dead husband. Kate takes Max and runs away from the house. When the police arrive, Leena disappears. Leena runs after Kate, trying to kill her and Max with a knife. Their chase takes them to a frozen pond, where Kate and Leena struggle. Max grabs Leena's snubnosed revolver trying to shoot her, but misses causing the ice to shatter. Leena and Kate fall into the freezing water. Kate crawls out of the hole, followed by Leena, who begs for her life, addressing Kate as "mommy" while hiding a knife behind her back. Kate responds, "I'm not your fucking mommy!" and fiercely kicks Leena in the face, breaking her neck, killing her and sending her flying back into the pond.The film ends with Kate and Max leaving the pond.
